The movie is called "John Dies at the End," but don't worry about John. He's not the lead character. Nobody cares about John. His problems are not your problems. In fact, every single thing wrong with "John Dies at the End" might have been avoided had John died at the beginning, along with all the other characters, transforming an awful full-length movie into a harmless five-minute short.

Directed with great and misguided confidence by Don Coscarelli, "John" is a slapdash, gross-out, free-form horror movie, adapted from a novel by David Wong. The convoluted plot borders on incoherence, despite the ever-present crutch of voiceover narration, spoken by the movie's protagonist. It tells the story of Dave (Chase Williamson), a man in his 20s who infects himself with a super drug known as soy sauce, which allows him to see all the demons and truly disgusting monsters that exist in our world, but invisible, within another dimension.

The only problem is that, if you see the demons, they see you, too, and react by cutting off people's heads, or burrowing into people's bodies with snakes that eventually explode out through their faces. The movie is full of grotesque images that are probably intended to be clever, maybe even funny, though it's hard to tell. "John Dies" is a series of flailing gestures in all directions. The actors seem to have been directed to behave as though something were slightly amusing. Leave it to the audience to figure out what.

Paul Giamatti, who appears throughout in a small role, either escaped or ignored the bad-acting edict. He plays it straight as a reporter and single-handedly raises the quality of "John Dies at the End" from Worst Film Ever Made to One of the Worst of 2013, which takes considerable heavy lifting. Here and there, in the reporter scenes, there are snippets of metaphysical ideas that could have been developed - not great ideas, but decent, like stuff found on the bottom of Philip K. Dick's trash can. They're tossed out and go nowhere.